The City

So I've spent the last week or so thinking about cities... the attacks on Bombay and being here in London and reading the New York Times online somehow made me think of The City as an entity much greater than the sum of its parts. I've thought of myself as a Torontonian for quite a while now -- perhaps more so after the disasterous year in Halifax than before! -- but watching and reading the attacks on Bombay in real time, as it were, I've realized again how much we owe to the idea of a city. There was all the usual stuff about how the city responded to the crisis as no other city had -- promptly debunked by the NYT comparing it to 9/11 (and the Guardian here comparing it to the attacks on London transit in July 2007; known here as 7/7). The thing is though that there is both greater impact (and tragedy) because this happend in a city and such a city and greater redemption.

I love cities: the noise of traffic, the crowds, the sense of never being alone because you can just choose to be anonymous in the crowd, the public transit, the sense that you are part of a community, will you or nill you, that is always moving, always growing, always embracing differences that you can't even imagine -- these are the things that cities have going for them. And there is something about how they are always space-conscious even as they are ever-growing that makes it impossible for any scar(e) to be permanent. The Twin Towers came down but New York will build something in that space because it has to; so also here in London, those Tube stations that were bombed are up and running again and in Bombay, too, Leopold's Cafe is already open and crowded where four days ago people lay bleeding. It's not that cities can't stand still and mourn, it's that they don't memorialize a space. We could concieve of leaving behind a blighted village and just building anew over the hill, but who can imagine a great city doing that. Where would the great cities go, anyway?

I'm living in the East End of London for this month and it's an area of this city that I've never really explored before. So I'm reading about it now as I'm walking its streets trying to orient myself: it is the part of the city that I like to think I'd live in if I had the choice because it is the raw pumping heart of London, with a history of radical politics, it has seen waves of immigration (think Kensignton Market spread over a vast area), and has been through numerous incarnations. This is the only riding that has sent a Communist to the British Parliament, right after the Second World War, when it was pulverized during the Blitz. Bethnal Green and Bow is now one of the poorest and most heterogenous ridings in the country and yet it nestles up to Westminister Palace and central London.

A place of contradiction, of despair and of hope -- kinda like the east end of Toronto, of so many slums in Bombay and of Queens in NYC. I suppose when you live in a city you have to live in close proximity to other lives and that in itself is a hopeful process.